Capturing the granularity of video watching with xAPI

A common problem with Learning Management System data is the granularity of the collected data. For example, if a teacher uploads a video lecture for students to watch, the only data collected is whether students opened the video link or not, but not whether they followed the video for its entire duration, the moments they paused or rewinded, etc.

The organization in charge of developing the xAPI standard developed a web application several years ago that allows to capture fine-grained data about students when watching Youtube videos and sending them to a Learning Record Store (LRS) using the xAPI format: https://github.com/adlnet/xapi-youtube.

However, this application was discontinued due to —among other things— some changes in browser restrictions that prevented data from being sent when the window was being closed, and therefore information on when students stopped watching the video was not collected.

As part of the ISILA project, we fixed these technical issues and we developed a new version of the application that allows to easily embed it into the learning management system. The developed application can be found here: https://github.com/sonsoleslp/xapi-youtube.

It can be used from the following URL: https://sonsoles.me/xapi-youtube/ by passing the user and LRS information on the query parameters.

Below is a screenshot of the xAPI records gathered for a fictitious student: